Is Mormonism the First New World Religion Since Islam?
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BYU Studies Quarterly Volume 44 Issue 4 Article 22 12-1-2005 Testing Stark's Thesis: Is Mormonism the First New World Religion since Islam? Gerald R. McDermott Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq Recommended Citation McDermott, Gerald R. (2005) "Testing Stark's Thesis: Is Mormonism the First New World Religion since Islam?," BYU Studies Quarterly: Vol. 44 : Iss. 4 , Article 22. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol44/iss4/22 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in BYU Studies Quarterly by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. McDermott: Testing Stark's Thesis: Is Mormonism the First New World Religion Testing Stark’s Thesis: Is Mormonism the First New World Religion since Islam? Gerald R. McDermott n 984, Rodney Stark startled the academic world with a claim that I has kept sociologists and religion-watchers scratching their heads ever since. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons,” he predicted, “will soon achieve a worldwide following comparable to that of Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and the other dominant world faiths.”¹ Stark claimed that Mormonism has grown faster than any other new religion in American history.² Between 840 and 980, it had averaged a growth rate of 44 percent per decade; in the four decades 940 through 980, growth zoomed to an astonishing 53 percent. If it maintained a 30 percent growth rate, Mormons would exceed 60 million by the year 2080; if 50 per- cent, then 265 million by 2080.³ “Today,” he declared, “they stand on the threshold of becoming the first major faith to appear on earth since the Prophet Mohammed rode out of the desert.”⁴ In 996, twelve years later, Stark reported that his high estimate of projected growth was too low: by 995 there were one million more Mormons than even a growth rate of 50 percent had predicted. Therefore he was still holding to his earlier projection of 265 million by 2080.⁵ In 200 he was saying the same: “By late in the twenty- first century the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will be a major world religion.”⁶ 271 Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2005 1 BYU Studies Quarterly, Vol. 44, Iss. 4 [2005], Art. 22 272 The Worlds of Joseph Smith In this paper we will test these claims by asking the following questions: Is Mormonism truly a new religion? Is it a world reli- gion? Is it the first since Islam? What are its prospects for continued growth? I should add that when I discuss “Mormonism,” I refer to the largest movement emerging from the life and teachings of Joseph Smith. There are many other smaller groups, such as the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), whose dynamics are different from the movement I am analyzing here. Is Mormonism New? In 984, Stark insisted that, while Mormons “have retained cul- tural continuities with Christianity (just as Christianity retained con- tinuities with Judaism and classical paganism), . the Mormons are a new religion.”⁷ There is some disagreement here. Some Mormon scholars object that most Mormon distinctions can be found in earlier Christian thinkers and practices; some Mormon believers believe that the notion of Mormonism as new only feeds old and often-virulent prej- udices that Mormonism is essentially unchristian and in fact a cult. But there is an emerging consensus among both Mormon and non-Mormon scholars, that while Mormonism retains significant and central features of mainstream Christian thought and practice, it nevertheless diverges in ways sufficient to merit its characterization as a “new religious tradition.”⁸ Jan Shipps, who “has come to know the Saints better than any previous outside observer,”⁹ has famously argued that Mormonism is a departure from the existing Christian tradition as much as early Christianity was a departure from Judaism. It abandoned both Roman Catholic and Protestant beliefs about the finality of the New Testament and particularly the Protestant prin- ciple of sola scriptura.¹⁰ Philip Barlow’s recent study of Latter-day Saint use of the Bible reinforces Shipps’s contention. Like Shipps, he believes Mormonism departs from sola scriptura: the new tradition puts limits on biblical authority and rejects the Bible as a sufficient religious guide.¹¹ https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol44/iss4/22 2 McDermott: Testing Stark's Thesis: Is Mormonism the First New World Religion First New World Religion since Islam? 273 Since the time of Joseph Smith, the Mormon use of scripture has combined a traditional faith in the Bible with more “conservative” elements (like a more than occasional extra dose of literalism), some liberal components (such as Joseph Smith’s Bushnell-like insistence on the limitations of human language), and, at least in an American context, some radical ingredients (an open canon, an oral scripture, the subjugation of biblical assertions to experimen- tal truth or the pronouncements of living authorities).¹² According to Barlow, Mormon apostle Bruce R. McConkie taught that while the Bible was originally inspired by God, it has since been corrupted and so now contains “only a shadow of the clearer, unmarred revelations Joseph Smith wrote and spoke.” Elder McConkie said, “[Our present Bible] contains a bucket, a small pail, a few draughts, no more than a small stream at most, out of the great ocean of revealed truth that has come to men in ages more spiritually enlightened than ours.”¹³ McConkie felt the most enlightened age was that of Joseph Smith, who, as Grant Underwood notes, has been given by Mormons the same canonical status as the apostle Paul.¹⁴ Barlow also points out that McConkie’s views often dismayed some Mormon leaders, but over time were thought to be generally orthodox.¹⁵ There are other significant departures from mainstream Christian thought, such as “the possibility of people evolving into gods,”¹⁶ the bodily nature of God, and “Latter-day Saints’ erasure of unassail- able walls of separation between matter and spirit and humans and gods.”¹⁷ For Eric Eliason, these doctrinal differences are possibly “serious enough to make Mormonism ultimately irreconcilable with traditional Christianity.”¹⁸ Two scholars beg to differ. Terryl Givens, citing Stephen Robinson, uses Stark’s outline of seven marks of orthodox Christian belief and finds that “in all seven cases, Mormon belief is in unambiguous accord with these core beliefs.” Even the Mormon idea of deifica- tion is not new, he argues; it is no different from what can be found in Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Athanasius, and Augustine. Givens cites Truman Madsen’s assertion (but without accompanying argument) that Mormon beliefs anticipate thinking held by Bonhoeffer, Hartshorne, and (Avery) Dulles.¹⁹ Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2005 3 BYU Studies Quarterly, Vol. 44, Iss. 4 [2005], Art. 22 274 The Worlds of Joseph Smith Yet at the same time, Givens suggests that Mormonism rejects what Kierkegaard called the “infinite qualitative difference” between the human and the divine: “The [Mormon sense of the] divine, in other words, was not characterized by the radical otherness that [mainstream Christian] religious tradition equated with the sacred. For this reason, [Smith’s] religious innovation was more the natural- izing of the supernatural than the other way around.”²⁰ For Givens, then, the Mormon sacred is not, after all, the traditional understand- ing of mysterium tremendum et fascinosum. Religion is not mystery; God in a sense has been reduced (at least in difference from human- ity) and humanity exalted. As Milton Backman puts it, Mormons teach an “anthropomorphic God and theomorphic man.”²¹ On the ontological nature of humanity and deity, then, even Givens suggests significant departure. Christie Davies is another scholar who says Mormonism is not a new religion. Instead, he argues, it “is best regarded . as merely a forward position on a Protestant line of advance away from Roman Catholicism and back towards the traditions of the Old Testament.”²² But Davies adds that if Mormonism maintains an ultra-Protestant concern for abstention from mild drugs of sociability (alcohol for fundamentalist Protestants, caffeine for Mormons), it neverthe- less guards a Jewish, “and very non-Christian, mode of defining its boundaries and identity through dietary taboos and an obsession with genealogy and descent.”²³ If Givens claims too much for the Mormon doctrine of deifica- tion (the Greek Fathers never broke down the wall of ontological separation between creature and Creator²⁴), he is nonetheless right to emphasize continuities between Mormonism and traditional Christianity.²⁵ After all, these have often been obscured by religious polemics. Evangelicals in particular need to hear that Mormons teach basically the same moral theology which John Paul II called the “gospel of life”; that they believe in the (original) Bible as the Word of God, Jesus as God the Son and not just the Son of God, Jesus as the only means of salvation, and the substitutionary atonement. They also need to know that Mormon scriptures assert that salvation is not earned by human effort but that Christ took our sins, we take his righteousness, and we are saved by grace through faith.²⁶ https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol44/iss4/22 4 McDermott: Testing Stark's Thesis: Is Mormonism the First New World Religion First New World Religion since Islam? 275 At the same time, however, the newness of this religious tradition cannot be denied. There is, in Barlow’s phrase, an “enduring differ- ence.”²⁷ Mormons enlarge the biblical canon, accept new revelation, claim that God the Father had his own father, hold that eternal law is independent of and coeternal with God, deny ontological difference between creature and Creator, and reject creatio ex nihilo.